This week, Taylor Swift became a billionaire at the age of 33. Not, unusually, via the means of the side-hustle, but mostly through her music alone. One thing that has bolstered this vast wealth is the systematic re-recording of her first six albums in lucrative protest at the ownership, since 2019, of her masters by the entrepreneur Scooter Braun (as part of his purchase of Big Machine. He doesn’t actually directly own them anymore, having sold the rights on, but still benefits from them).
In the same week, reports are surfacing of labels scrambling to limit the likelihood of this happening again. It’s normal for an artist to be restricted from re-recording their own music for five to seven years after release, or two years after the expiration of their contract (or their release from it, which in practice doesn’t happen very much) but a number of US music attorneys told Billboard that they had started suddenly to see clauses in new contracts extending this period to 10 or 15 years.
In one case, said entertainment lawyer Gandhar Savur, “I recently did a deal with a very big indie that had a 30-year re-record restriction in it. Which obviously is much longer than I’m used to seeing.” Another lawyer, Dina LaPolt, said “we’re seeing a lot of ‘perpetuity’”.
I can absolutely get behind any label that has invested significantly in an artist retaining the rights to the masters created during their time under contract, for a reasonable amount of time. Five to seven years is fine, ten feels like the top, but still OK. 30 is just punitive and nasty and seems likely to result only in resentment, since most artist representatives will push back against it immediately.
And in most cases it's totally unnecessary. In practice there are very few artists for whom the costly re-recording of their back catalogue would be remotely worth doing. Swifties, at their swiftiest, are extremists in their loyalty to their queen, and Swift has actively encouraged them to buy and listen to only her versions of the albums (even though the latest Taylor’s Version, 1989, is, whisper it, inferior to the original).
Swift inspires an ardour, and wields a level of public clout, unmatched by almost any other artist, with the possible exception of Beyoncé. She is an anomaly.
For most artists it simply wouldn’t make sense, and even if they were to do it, it would be unlikely to damage the label’s bottom line much. In addition, it seems a truly vile move to pluck, say, a young rapper, or an emerging indie band, from obscurity and then tie them into a 30 year agreement, by which time they could easily have left the industry altogether. It is a dereliction of a duty of care, particularly to a young artist.
And this speaks to another point. The re-recording issue, though now a cause célèbre due to Swift’s massive visibility, can be viewed as a distraction from a much wider problem, which is the long-standing issue of exploitative recording contracts across the music industry. The recent increased interest in “artist-friendly deals” simply turns a stark light on what has gone before, i.e. the opposite.
Artists such as Megan Thee Stallion and Raye have spoken out about byzantine, artist-unfriendly deals. When Megan sued her former label 1501 Certified Entertainment earlier this year, she noted that when she signed her contract she was very young, just 20 years old, and didn’t really understand what was in it.
The contents of the contract have since been seen and reported and are indeed gobsmacking, including clauses retaining perpetual control for the label over her likeness, her legal and her professional name in relation to merchandising, and her choice of extra-contractual appearances or features on other artists’ music, plus a whopping cut of any fee she might get for them, despite clarifying it had no obligation to either obtain these opportunities or negotiate for her. Legal representatives for 1501 later stated that the two sides had “mutually reached a confidential settlement to resolve their legal differences” and that Megan and 1501 would “amicably part ways”.
In 2021, the singer Raye (who by that stage had more than 17 million monthly listeners on Spotify, and had released seven top 20 singles) went on Twitter to decry her situation at Polydor.
“I have been on a 4 ALBUM RECORD DEAL since 2014 !!! And haven’t been allowed to put out one album,” she wrote. “ALL I CARE ABOUT is the music. Im sick of being slept on and I’m sick of being in pain about it this is not business to me this so personal”.
Soon after Polydor and Raye came to an agreement, with the label releasing a statement saying “Polydor and Raye have made an amicable and mutual decision to part ways."It seems likely that Raye’s contract, signed when she was about 17, contained no, or a very weak, release clause. According to Cassine Bering, a solicitor at Briffa Legal, “A release clause is essentially an ultimatum for the label – either it puts your music out or it releases you from the contract. It is an essential clause for any artist but is rarely included in the first draft. Release clauses come in all shapes and sizes and must be read in context of the overall agreement. They aren’t always what they seem and require a trained eye to dissect.”
Raye was released from her contract later in 2021 and earlier this year she released My 21st Century Blues as an independent artist. It debuted at number 2 in the UK charts, was nominated for this year's Mercury Prize, and has been hailed as one of the best albums of the year so far. Not bad for a girl who in 2021 was “still awaiting confirmation that I am good enough to release an album”.
Things are changing, slowly. In a punchy move that ultimately worked in her favour, the Bronx rapper Ice Spice and her management, led by James Rosemond Jr, went into her major label negotiation all guns blazing and secured an insanely good deal (of course, her management will, in return, be taking a significant cut of the riches coming her way) that retains control of both her masters and her publishing, and full creative control.
In 2020, the folk artist Lucy Rose was able to launch her own label in partnership with Communion in order to release the music of a fellow artist, Samantha Crain. “I knew what was most important to me was that the artists needs came first, artist-friendly deals,” Rose said.
But these are, again, anomalies – that's why we know about them. Which is why it’s important that earlier this year the government established a working group looking into ‘creator remuneration’. I hope that it doesn’t stop at streaming deals, and really looks into this issue, because otherwise, ultimately, the people who come out of this worst are those with the least power – the emerging artists who make the music landscape so incredibly exciting.
What the Culture Editor did this week
Thunderclap: A memoir of art and life and sudden death, Laura Cumming
I’ve finally plucked this volume, a memoir interwoven with art history, from the pile beside my bed this week and I’m captivated. Cumming writes, particularly about art, with the lyricism of a true apostle, tempered with a lack of pretension suited to a seasoned newspaper journalist. I can’t tell yet where it’s going but I’m loving finding out.
King Lear, Wyndham's Theatre
Kenneth Branagh is giving us his Lear at 62, supported by a cast of mostly recent RADA graduates. It's set during the Neolithic era and the production is almost as old fashioned. Queen Charlotte's Corey Mylchreest steals the show as Edmund, and it romps along (two hours straight through!) but it's not a Lear for the ages, and the music is like something out of Time Team.
